Communicate effectively through a business glossary – Michelle Knight

Ineffective communication costs money, about $26,000 a year, per employee, according to Inc. Siloed teams and individuals, working remotely across different departments, present a significant component to this problem. This reason alone makes a business glossary, a resource describing an organization's internal terminology, an elegant and effective solution. 

In small and large companies, businesspeople down in the trenches, need a shared centralized space to collaborate about meaning and context. In a recent email correspondence with Alexander Forrest, a small company, a representative wanted one spot for all its team to access acronyms, jargon, and industry-specific terms. 

ScanOne, a growing mid-sized organization that I worked for in 2016, needed a reference tool to clarify conflicting meanings between departments. In both cases, developing and using an online business glossary led to more effective communications, making it a practical solution to consider. 

Read further about using business glossaries to keep your internal vocabulary consistent and productive.

• What is a business glossary?
• What happens without a business glossary?
• How does a glossary enhance business communication?
• What makes a business glossary work?

What is a business glossary?

A business glossary is a flexible tool used to encourage collaboration and standardize terms. With a good business glossary, different stakeholders, employees, and customers can work together more effectively by providing a more explicit context and meaning around work procedures.

Since semantics and pragmatics change over time, a business glossary grows and changes with an organization. Think of it as a living document balancing as a reference and review of internal vocabulary.

Business glossary entries stay concise and easy to read. Each one has the term in bold and a one to a two-sentence description. 

Some glossary terms may provide more detail, including examples, variants, exceptions, and synonyms. But glossary meanings tend to stay thrifty, only supplying enough information to use the term.

What happens without a business glossary?

As the employees at Alexander Forrest found with a business glossary, "they used more specialized language than they first realized." Without a business glossary, technical terms risk slipping through the cracks.

In the case of ScanOne, a company that streamlined invoice processing and payment for customers, I saw the cross-company consequences in misunderstanding and misusing the term workorder.

I started a business department called Production, where everyone in that department used the terms workorder and invoice interchangeably to mean the work to do or in process. When I transferred to IT to write some business requirements, I learned IT saw a workorder as a particular value in the database, different from the invoice entry. 

As a result, I needed to rewrite the documentation so that both Production and IT shared the same workorder meaning. Had the company had a business glossary, I could have written the requirements quickly and correctly at the start.

How does a business glossary enhance communication?

A business glossary encourages collaboration across the organization and provides information that would be missing when not physically in the same space. Stakeholders, those impacted by a term's usage, need to meet and agree when drafting the definition. 

This partnership ensures that employees across the company refer to the business glossary in training or work tasks. Otherwise, the business glossary ends up a pointless singular administrative exercise.

In the Alexander Forrest example, stakeholders meet and collaborate in real-time to write any definitions. "This pop-up committee exists only long enough to write a knowledge base article."

When people interact remotely, they can find metadata, information about the information used for internal communications, in a business glossary. This metadata puts in words what remote workers cannot see and hear, the implicit meaning from facial expressions, movements, gestures, body stance, and tone of voice. Customer service and technical writing benefit from both business glossary advantages.

Customer service:

Customers like excellent service, where representatives find out and get them what they want, accurately, politely, and enthusiastically. To achieve this efficiently, a support team needs to communicate with each other and other departments well and have easy access to essential reference tools.

A business glossary provides both, especially online. It creates the customer service team's opportunity to review, come to an agreement, and review ambiguous terms, like a return.

Also, concisely defining a term, like return in a business glossary, gets to the fundamental meaning quicker, unlike a paragraph-long policy FAQ on a web page. From the glossary, service people can make good decisions about the next steps to further help the customer or research company processes. 

Technical writing:

A business glossary impacts technical writing in two ways. First, it informs the technical writer on how to write a document and what to write.

Any technical author needs to know what internal terms mean to create accurate context and to write from the reader's frame of reference. In addition to informing the technical writer, a business glossary allows a technical writer to clarify and create terms centrally as part of the documentation process. 

Often, technical writers need to talk with developers and subject matter experts about content. 

Should an author find different meanings between the two groups and ambiguity, that writer could arrange a meeting with all the stakeholders to clarify the term. Once the writer has received agreement across groups, that person can document the glossary definition and make it readily available across the organization. 

With an agreed-upon understanding, both the glossary and the documentation under construction should find greater use. Then, the technical writer can point to metrics advocating his or her value to the organization. 

What makes a business glossary work?

Business glossaries work best when they have good quality definitions. A workable business glossary needs to be a trustworthy authority that people in the organization value and use.

Companies need information/data governance principles and practices like support for collaborating cross-department, clear roles, and authority responsible for the business glossary to get to a good business glossary. An excellent technical platform helps too.

Alexander Forrest attributes its business glossary success to enabling conversations between a small group of stakeholders, a continuous review process until reaching consensus, and a leadership team member responsible for maintaining glossary content. Also, it benefited from having a "glossary functionality that worked well in effectively communicating specialized terms and acronyms to its teams."

ScanOne had a person in charge of the business glossary, some interdepartmental meetings, and some agreed-upon use. The glossary terms clarified workorder and invoice for future cross Production and IT conversations.

I left ScanOne before gathering enough data about the business glossary's effectiveness in communicating across sections. There was not a data governance process in place to update it, according to my knowledge.

Conclusion 

Business glossaries with good information or data governance provide an elegant solution to communicating cross-departments effectively. These reference tools support collaboration towards a common vocabulary necessary for training and work activities. As Alexander Forrest states, its business glossary, with stakeholder discussions, leads to the best definitions quickly.

Other companies would benefit from business glossaries too. Customer service reps can more accurately get customers what they want by using a business glossary for guidance. Technical writers create more relevant documents readers understand when aligning with a business glossary. 

Also, employees can easily access a business glossary remotely, online, and scan it for the information they need. Processes that guide glossary term creation, modification, and deletion keep the content relevant and valuable. Business glossaries continue to bridge communication gaps making employee production more effective. 

References to Learn More About Business Glossaries

• Glossary Features: KnowledgeOwl, https://support.knowledgeowl.com/help/glossary-feature 
• Business Glossary Basics: Dataversity,  https://www.dataversity.net/business-glossary-basics/ 
• A Corporate Glossary Case Study, https://tdan.com/a-corporate-glossary-case-study/27589 
• Data Dictionary vs. Business Glossary: The Low Down,  https://idm.net.au/article/0012671-data-dictionary-vs-business-glossary-low-down